Laura Loomer is regarded within the White House as an uncontrollable and toxic force whose deep loyalty to the president is tempered by her tendency to turn on almost anyone, even her allies. Laura Loomer in a congressional office building in Washington. “America First is whatever President Trump says it is,” she posted on X recently. The New York Times Ken Bensinger and Robert Draper Jul 17, 2025 https://www.afr.com/world/north-ame...-of-trump-s-fiercest-advocate-20250709-p5mdq5 Through battles big and small since President Donald Trump took office, one intense conflict stands out for the president’s openness to once-fringe views and voices. It is the struggle by some of his aides to contain Laura Loomer. Loomer, the right-wing agitator whose proud Islamophobia and self-styled role as an ideological purity enforcer have made her toxic to some members of Trump’s inner circle, got the upper hand in late March. Her posts on the social platform X about several National Security Council aides she deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump got his attention. He asked her by phone to come to the Oval Office the following week. On April 2, Loomer sat with a thick folder on her lap, facing the president at the Resolute Desk. She elaborated on her findings about the deputy national security adviser, Alex Wong, who she pointed out had worked on the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a critic of Trump, and whose wife had clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor and been involved in the prosecution of the January 6, 2021, defendants. She criticised a dozen other aides in the presence of several administration officials, including Michael Waltz, then the national security adviser, who had stepped in uninvited midway through the meeting. After her presentation, Trump barked to Waltz, “I want all of them fired.” He dismissed the group and hugged Loomer on her way out. Wong survived the day, but six employees in Loomer’s folder were ousted. Two months later, White House staffers scored a small victory. On June 11, Trump attended the opening night of Les Miserables at the Kennedy Centre. So did Loomer, who ascended the stairway to the VIP section, where the president awaited the curtain. But she was stopped at the top by a White House aide. Loomer insisted that she had permission to visit Trump’s section. The aide held his ground. A Kennedy Centre employee joined the scene. For several minutes, the employee and the aide blockaded Loomer’s path to Trump. Finally, furious, she stormed back down the stairs. But the slight has hardly deterred her from using her prominence on social media to promote her own take on supporting Trump’s agenda. Earlier this month, in an apparent reference to the entire Hispanic population of the United States, she expressed relish over the prospect of people being eaten alive while trying to escape the swampland immigration detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz”. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,” she posted on X. In one of more than a dozen interviews with The New York Times for this article, Loomer, 32, dismisses the notion that she is an interloper who lacks credible standing with the president. “My point of access to the White House is Donald Trump,” she says. “And that’s really hard for people to comprehend.” Within the White House, Loomer is regarded as an uncontrollable and toxic force whose deep loyalty to Trump is tempered by her tendency to turn on almost anyone, even her allies. No member of Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing would speak about her on the record. The same character traits that endear her to the president and lead him to call her several times a month – particularly her seemingly total lack of fear – make many top aides treat her gingerly, as if she might unpin a hand grenade. She has filed a defamation lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher and HBO for Maher’s suggestion on his show last September that Loomer was sexually involved with Trump. “Just because a woman is able to get access to the president, and she isn’t a millionaire and doesn’t work for the Republican Party, she must be sleeping with the president?” she says. “I don’t like using the term, because I don’t want to sound like a liberal, but there really is a lot of misogyny.” Still, Loomer acknowledges that the president is central to her life. “President Trump comes first,” she says she has told her boyfriend, “and if you can’t handle that, then go find somebody else.” After one meeting with Trump in 2023, she wrote effusively on X, “I love him so much.” Trump, for his part, frequently praises Loomer, calling her “a fantastic woman, a true patriot” at one rally and “amazing” at another. “She’s got the same intensity Roy Cohn had,” says Steve Bannon, a podcaster who was a senior adviser to the first Trump administration, referring to the pugilistic lawyer who helped Trump become a player in New York decades ago. Loomer has taken great pains to make herself worthy of the part. She styles herself as Trump’s pre-eminent loyalist, declaring on X last month that “America First is whatever President Trump says it is”. And she’s hyper-conscious of the value Trump places on appearance. “Every time I go and see the president,” she says, “I always buy a new outfit, because I want to look my best.” Her growing celebrity was on display one evening last month, when she dined at the Capital Grille, a prominent Washington steakhouse, with a Times reporter and her lawyer, Larry Klayman, who had spent the day helping his client prepare for her deposition in the suit against Maher. In the crowded dining room, Loomer traded warm hellos with Republican senator Ted Cruz, while James Blair, a White House deputy chief of staff, came to her table to give her a hug. Over dinner, Loomer recalls that just 15 years earlier she had been an overweight teenager who “used to cry in the bathroom” because she couldn’t fit in trendy clothes. At times, she says, her weight hit more than 90 kilograms; now she weighs about 57. Picking at her scallops, which she ordered despite her fondness for steak, Loomer adds, “I’ve got to stay thin.” In interviews, Loomer takes exception to what she says is the characterisation of her as a “conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim activist”. Rather, she maintains, she is a person of considerable influence: “On a daily basis, I communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world.” Laura Loomer speaks with Republican Congressman Abraham Hamadeh in front of a photograph of Donald Trump at the Longworth House Office Building in Washington. The New York Times Both descriptions, of course, can be true. Loomer once posted a video on X saying that the September 11 attacks were “an inside job”, though she now says the post was misinterpreted. She routinely refers to Trump’s defeat in 2020 – the same year she lost a congressional race in Florida – as “the stolen election”. After losing in a congressional Republican primary two years later, Loomer refused to accept defeat, explaining on social media that, “YOU DO NOT CONCEDE WHEN THERE IS THEFT INVOLVED!” Her anti-Islamic rhetoric has been even more prolific. She labelled herself a “#ProudIslamophobe” on Twitter in 2017, a year before the platform banned her for hateful speech towards Democrat Ilhan Omar, who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. “I don’t believe Islam is a real religion,” Loomer says, claiming baselessly that the Qatari government was “the biggest financier” of the Black Lives Matter movement. After Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, won the recent Democratic mayoral primary in New York, she warned on X that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame”. Her 1.7 million followers on her reactivated X account include Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI director Kash Patel, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Stephen Miller, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. Republican political candidates clamour for her endorsement; last month, Vance invited Loomer to meet him in his office. Loomer with Steve Bannon at Butterworth’s bar in Washington in February. Leigh Vogel She lives with her rescue dogs on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a modest red brick ranch-style rental, splitting the costs with her live-in boyfriend. One bedroom has been converted into a studio for her twice-weekly podcast, Loomer Unleashed, which has 80,000 followers on video-sharing platform Rumble. The walls are filled with photographs of herself in combative moments, including when she was ushered out of a House hearing in 2018 for disrupting the testimony of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. That freeze-frame seems apt for a person who remains defiantly outside the mainstream. She is still locked out of her original Facebook and Instagram accounts. She is under the binding terms of a settlement not to speak disparagingly about the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is paying the nonprofit $US1200 ($1800) a month to reimburse it for legal costs and other fees after a lawsuit she filed was dismissed as meritless. (Loomer is suing her original lawyer in that case for malpractice and will use any proceeds to help pay her debt to CAIR.) She was denied a concealed-carry firearms permit in Florida. Loomer professes indifference. “At the end of the day,” she says, “I play for an audience of one.” Loomer has spent most of her life searching for an audience of any kind. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, in a tumultuous household. When she was 11, her parents divorced. Five months later, one of her two younger brothers, who had already been admitted to hospital multiple times “due to uncontrollable behaviour problems”, according to medical records, attacked her mother and was placed in a government group home. A decade after that, the same brother tried to choke his father to death and was charged with aggravated domestic assault, although he eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser crime. Loomer outside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta where Donald Trump was being processed in 2023 on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. The New York Times By the time Loomer was 12, her mother had ceased playing a meaningful role in her life. Eventually, a state court awarded full custody to her father, Jeffrey, a rheumatologist. In an interview, Jeffrey Loomer says that he saw only one solution to maintaining peace in the household, which was to keep the violent child under his watch while sending his daughter and youngest son off to boarding school. Loomer says she started thinking about Islam after the September 11 attacks, when she was 8. She often justifies her attacks on Muslims by invoking her religion: though she admits she’s not particularly observant, she calls herself a “feisty Jewess” and frequently wears a Star of David pendant around her neck. But over time, her anti-Muslim rants began to catch up with her. By 2019, she was banned by every major social media network and even by car services Uber and Lyft after she posted that “I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver”. At just 25, Loomer had lost her megaphone and feared that her media career was over. “It was a massive blow to Laura,” says Shane Cory, a digital fundraising specialist who assisted Loomer in amassing online donors to support her activities, which included handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York City headquarters with a yellow Star of David affixed to her clothes in late 2018. That same year Loomer relocated to Palm Beach, and in 2019 she prepared a run for Congress. Despite being a political neophyte, she proved to be an energetic campaigner and fundraiser, enough so to win the Republican primary and gain Trump’s endorsement. Still, she lost by close to 20 points in a deep-blue district in 2020 to the Democratic incumbent, Lois Frankel. She lost again in 2022, this time in the Republican primary in a different district, to the incumbent, Daniel Webster. Trump had refrained from endorsing anyone in the primary, which Webster won by almost seven points. Loomer claimed fraud and refused to acknowledge defeat. Webster’s campaign said in a statement that she had “lost all sight of truth and reality”. She emerged from the 2022 contest broke and despondent, but soon found two lifelines. One was the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who began restoring banned accounts, including hers, soon after taking over the company. The second was a deal she struck with Rumble, a right-wing video-streaming platform, that paid her $US15,000 a month to make content with a Florida media company. General Timothy Haugh testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington in March. Haugh was fired as director of the National Security Agency after Loomer met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office in early April. The New York Times Repositioning herself as Trump’s fiercest advocate, she focused on attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who figured to be Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Over the next 18 months, her attacks were relentless; she once went so far as to suggest that the breast cancer experienced by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, had “been over exaggerated in a desperate effort to get votes”. In February 2023, Loomer had just returned from staging a ruckus at a book-signing event for DeSantis when her mobile phone announced that an “unknown caller” was on the line. “Hello Laura, it’s your favourite president,” Trump said on the other end. “I love what you did today.” It was the first time the former president had called her, and he asked her to visit him in person. “I was so excited,” Loomer recalls. Weeks later, she drove to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, where Trump met her, accompanied by Wiles. The former president encouraged Loomer to take another shot at Congress. She demurred and said returning Trump to the White House took precedence. Trump turned to Wiles, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, and said: “Let’s hire her. Let’s put her on the campaign.” Loomer filled out the appropriate forms and was told that her start date would be April 1, 2023. But April 1 came and went. The next week, the Times reported that Trump was considering hiring Loomer, and by the end of the day, a campaign official announced that the job offer had been withdrawn. “I was so depressed,” Loomer says. “I cried so much. I locked myself in my apartment for like a month. I lost like 15 pounds.” She has been outside looking in ever since. In March, Sergio Gor, the White House’s director of personnel, called Loomer and asked her to pay a visit. Loomer was delighted. From her perspective, this could mean only one thing: that she was finally about to be offered a White House job. She booked a flight to Washington and met in Gor’s office adjacent to the White House. To her chagrin, Gor wanted only to engage in small talk. “I really enjoy and take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck at their job.” — Laura Loomer Sitting in her hotel room, fuming, Loomer began digging into deputy national security adviser Wong’s background, combing through websites looking for signs of disloyalty. Her best work, she says, comes “in the aftermath of when I’ve been disrespected”. She then set her sights on two holdovers from the Biden administration, General Timothy Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, and his deputy, Wendy Noble. Both were fired after her Oval Office meeting with Trump in early April. Weeks later, the White House withdrew the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, the sister-in-law of Waltz, for surgeon general after Loomer savaged her on social media as “not ideologically aligned” with Trump. It is hard to say how decisive a role Loomer played in these personnel decisions. Asked to put a number on the job casualties – which she calls “scalps” – that she can take credit for, Loomer replies, “I don’t even know.” But she adds: “I really enjoy and take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck at their job.” Trump publicly denied that she had influenced his decision to fire the National Security Council aides, and White House officials have suggested Loomer has tended to claim credit for work done quietly in the administration. But some close allies of the president believe there are those in the government who have furtively supplied Loomer with information so she can do their dirty work of publicly disparaging certain personnel for them. It has not escaped Loomer’s notice that many of her peers in the MAGA ecosystem have become rich. Recently, in hopes of improving her financial fortunes, she started a consulting business, Loomered Strategies, with a business partner in New York state. “I’m kind of like pivoting,” she says. “I do journalism, but also I’m now going to be doing a lot of advising in terms of opposition research, executive-level vetting and advocacy.” She says she has five clients and that overall her activities earn a gross income of about $US300,000. Even when working with clients, Loomer remains mindful of her primary audience. A rare slip came in May, when her anti-Islam impulses led her to criticise the Trump administration for accepting a luxury 747 from the Qatari government, which she labelled “jihadists in suits”. Trump called her the next day from Air Force One en route to Saudi Arabia and, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange, conveyed his deep displeasure with her. She apologised in a lengthy post on X in which she also reminded others of her special access to the president: “I know I could have probably just had a private conversation about the plane instead.” Loomer says she has had at least four conversations with Trump since that time and is confident their relationship is as strong as ever, despite continuing efforts by some White House aides to marginalise her. She is less sanguine about what lies ahead. “I feel like Western civilisation is in a death spiral,” she says, likening Trump with the lone source of light in an otherwise dark world. “Eventually, a candle burns out. But it’s a slow burn.” And once that dim source of optimism is snuffed out? “I don’t know what my life is going to look like when President Trump is out of office,” she says. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.